Pricing, Security Deter Mobile App Downloads, Says Survey

The price of mobile applications and a fear of offering credit card digits are the major factors preventing some consumers from purchasing mobile apps, says a modest study by Asknet. The majority of those who do buy apps spent less than $50 over the year, mostly on music.

Analysts are expecting mobile
application sales to rocket upward over the next several years. However,
there are still a few factors preventing some consumers from shopping,
according to a modest poll conducted in late 2009 by Asknet, the maker of a
"mobile shopping cart" solution that facilitates the purchases of
mobile apps.
A major deterrent for 38 percent of survey respondents,
Asknet reports, is the price of applications, while 29 percent said they
didn't feel comfortable offering their credit card information for
purchases. Overall, 34 percent of respondents called buying applications
"not worth the time or effort."

The survey consisted of 400 smartphone users and was
conducted in Boston and San Francisco. Asknet reports that 45 percent of those
surveyed had never bought an application or software for their smartphone. Of
the 55 percent that had, 87 percent spent less than $50 over the last year,
while 3 percent spent between $51 and a $100 and 1 percent spent more than
$150.
Music comprised the bulk of purchases, or 61 percent.
Forty-one percent of those surveyed said they'd bought games, 35 percent
had bought ringtones, 33 percent spent on news, 29 percent bought GPS or
location-aware software and nearly a third, or 27 percent, purchased business
applications.
"Mobile commerce is a rapidly maturing market. We have
seen e-commerce continue to gain widespread user acceptance," Aston
Fallon, president of Asknet, said in a Jan. 21 statement.

"At this point, we believe that the barrier has moved
beyond just the hesitation of the consumer. Our survey suggests that the
mechanisms for e-commerce may be having the greatest effect on the rate at
which consumers embrace smartphones for mobile purchasing," Fallon
continued. "It is up to handset manufacturers to work in tandem with
mobile developers to create more secure, user-friendly platforms to promote the
adoption of e-commerce."
Motorola, coincidentally, announced on Jan. 22 that it was opening
an Android app store for Android handset owners in China, which would
additionally make it easy for developers to promote and market their
applications to end users.
Asknet adds that Research In Motion's BlackBerry
handsets and the Apple iPhone were the most popular devices among the
smartphone users in surveyed. In Boston, 53 percent of those polled owned a
BlackBerry, 37 percent owned an iPhone and 10 percent owned devices by other
manufacturers.
In San Francisco, the mixed-bag of "other
manufacturers" accounted for 41 percent of those polled, while 34 percent
owned a BlackBerry and 25 percent owned an iPhone.

Michelle Maisto has been covering the enterprise mobility space for a decade, beginning with Knowledge Management, Field Force Automation and eCRM, and most recently as the editor-in-chief of Mobile Enterprise magazine. She earned an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and in her spare time obsesses about food. Her first book, The Gastronomy of Marriage, if forthcoming from Random House in September 2009.